“They didn’t see it. It was a perfectly impersonal clutch they were strangling me with. They hadn’t any notion of their own dismaying breach of reticence. We were all in Soerabaya--which was hell--together; and conventions didn’t exist. Also, I couldn’t any more get out of it than if we had been more literally in Hell and they ineluctable and imperishable shades. I had to go on. “‘She won’t go,’ I said at last to Dorrien. ‘And you absolutely can’t go alone?’ “He didn’t speak, but he turned his eyes on me again. I seemed to read in them that the question had been put to him before, and that he would not again go through the agony of answering. Not that the answer in those silent eyes wasn’t clear. Then, after a little, he did speak. ‘Ask her if she counsels me to go alone.’ “My very spirit revolted at the way they had laid hands on me. Anything I said was bound to be damnable for one or the other of them. I swore I’d get out of the thing non-partisan if I insulted them both. “‘I won’t ask her,’ I said. ‘I won’t have anything more to do with it. It’s a devilish mess, and one of you has to go under. But I won’t lift a finger to determine which one. You may take that from me straight, both of you.’ “We ought by rights to have been tearing about that porch dramatically; but we all sat perfectly still in sheer exhaustion, dripping with sweat and breathing in quiet, regular pants. I wish--I wish it had never been. “‘You won’t even tell him that he can’t go at all? Such a simple thing as that?’ She flung out her hands in a queer, uncertain way. She was very far gone. “‘I won’t tell him anything. Good night.’ I pulled myself out of my chair and leaned over the railing. I don’t know how long I looked down into the hot little garden. I didn’t mean to be a beast. Were you ever in a place where you couldn’t stir a muscle without committing murder? No, I suppose not. Well, that’s what I felt like. It seemed inevitable that pretty soon they’d trap me into saying something that sounded like advice; and it looked to me as if any advice, once followed, would be fatal. There wasn’t any right way out, they being what they were. It was up to whatever Power had made them. It was absolutely _not_ up to me. I began counting lizards on the railing. Every bone in my body ached with stiffness when I finally turned round. They had gone.” Hoyting lighted a cigarette. He had finished it, and lighted another, before he spoke again. “The next morning I got off on a filthy little tramp steamer at four o’clock. It wasn’t a steamer the Dorriens could possibly take. I don’t think they would even have known about it. Then I made straight for China; I was pretty sure neither one of them would think of China. And by that time I had got back nerve enough to be quite sure that I had done right in keeping my hands off. But--I never asked any one what became of them. Now you say you know.” “Oh, yes, I know. Dorrien’s dead.” “They went back?”